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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cerebral Paladin" data-source="post: 5459620" data-attributes="member: 3448">Deforch's 8th AdventureLast Sunday, I ran a short and straightforward D&D adventure for my son.  I'm currently working in Texas on a Monday through Thursday schedule, then flying back home for each weekend.  Because of Dallas's inability to deal with snow, I was only back home for less than 36 hours, so I wanted to do something fun with my son on the Sunday morning before I had to fly back to Texas.  So even though I didn't really have much of anything prepared or even well thought through, I ran a D&D game for him.  One of the nice things about running games for a four year old is that an adventure that would be painfully lame for adults can still be fun and exciting.Deforch was in his family's castle when one of the peasants who lived near the castle approached him for help.  I had fun role-playing the peasant as extremely nervous to be talking to someone as important as Deforch, who after all is the eldest son of the local nobility.  I'm not at all sure that my son understood why the peasant was nervous, but he still seemed to be having fun.  He did resolutely inform the peasant not to address him as "m'lord Deforch," that just "Deforch" was fine.  I couldn't really tell if my son understood why the peasant was calling him "m'lord."  Anyway, the peasant told him that one of their cows had been killed--ripped apart--and that they wanted Deforch to investigate, find out what had happened, and prevent it from happening again.  Deforch of course agreed.He then went to the scene of the attack and looked at the cow's body.  I described the large puncture marks on the cow, and how it had been basically ripped apart, and started a skill challenge (although I didn't use that term for my son).  His initial thoughts were to wonder if it might have been a displacer beast--not Slingie, of course, but some other bad displacer beast.  He also looked at the mini of a white dragon and speculated about whether Freezie might rip up a cow like that.  I had him roll a skill check to examine the wounds on the cow, and he succeeded easily, concluding that they weren't the sorts of wounds that a displacer beast or dragon would make, but that they included very large punctures, about an inch or two across.  My son got excited at this point and wondered aloud whether the wounds were from the monsters Deforch fought before, in the "me-me" adventure as he called it.  I was very pleased with this, because I had already decided that the attackers had been kruthiks, which is the actual name for the me-mes.  I reminded him of the name, and this time he used the word "kruthiks" instead of using his term for them.  He looked around for footprints (another skill check), and after a moment found them--they had five claws all set close together, just like kruthiks!My son then announced that he was going to look underground for a tunnel.  At first, this confused me, but then I realized that he had previously encountered the kruthiks tunneling through the ground, so he figured that there must be a tunnel nearby if there had been a kruthik attack.  I thought that was pretty clever actually, and Deforch quickly found the tunnel with a Perception check.  Another check or two to wriggle, jump, and climb his way through the tunnel brought him to the kruthik lair.As he entered, he was attacked by a group of kruthik hatchlings.  He used his Dire Wolverine Strike to attack all four at once, killing three of them.  The last one clawed and bit him, but he finished it off the next round.  He then fought the adult kruthik that was leading this group.  It was a pretty tough monster for a 2nd level character to face alone, but I was pretty sure that it would be okay as long as I didn't use its powers in an obnoxious way.  I need not have worried.  Deforch got a critical hit in one of his first attacks, eliminating almost half its hit points in the first round.  Another two rounds of attacks easily dropped the kruthik, and while Deforch took some light wounds, they were nothing to worry about, even for a four year old.  Once Deforch defeated the kruthiks, he returned and told the peasant that the other cow and the sheep should be safe now, and the game ended.It was a fun and entertaining time playing together.  As I said, for an adult (or even teen) player, that adventure would have been terrible--completely linear, and with the classic bad skill challenge design of "if you pass the skill challenge, you find the adventure--otherwise, the adventure is over."  But I knew that he would pass the skill challenge, because the difficulty was low relative to his skills, and because even if he had gotten three failures, I would have let him keep trying.  I might have improved some negative consequence, but even so.  But for a child, just getting to play and imagine the scene and roll the dice and then win was enough to make it fun.There was also an amusing bit of "my son tries to determine the whole game" early on, where he was telling me about an evil villain named Flame Bowl (I think that was the name), who was really dangerous because he could turn into a fire elemental or an air elemental and was immune to water.  I explained that that wasn't the villain for today's game but that Deforch could fight him in the future.  My son was enthusiastic about that idea--"that's who Deforch will have to fight next time, but he's really tough!"  So I think my next game already has the climactic battle pre-planned.</blockquote>

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